Friday, 19 September 2014

Next morning it was on with the literary tour ... to Beatrix Potter's Hill Top, with apples growing around the door, a fire crackling in the grate, and dressers full of teapots and Delft that you can see in her books. It is a house for a single lady and I hadn't realised that she didn't live here after her marriage, but used it as a studio/bolthole, installing her husband in a bigger house she owned just over the road. (This sounds a perfect marital arrangement to me.)

You shuffle through Hill Top with Potter fans from all over the world - well, mostly Japan. But when we arrived at Bank Ground Farm - immortalised as Holly Howe in Swallows and Amazons - we were the only ones there. Of course, you can't resist tacking down the steep field to the lake, just like Ship's Boy's Roger ...
Although, if you're a stickler for accuracy, Roger tacked up the field to where Mother was waiting with the duffers don't drown telegram. Roger was seven. My knees don't do up-hill.

This year's sloe gin will be Swal-loes Gin, although I picked barely enough for one bottle as the hedges were almost picked bare. Still, beats buying them on ebay like last time.

We sat and watched the steam yacht chugging across the lake. And instead of pemmican and lashing of ginger beer, we had the best tea and cake of the entire trip. (Lime and coconut sponge. On a 'help yourself' honesty system - are they mad, trusting ladies with cake - that put us on our honour as landlubbers to cut it generously but fairly.)

Ruskin isn't fashionable these days but it was only down the road to his house, so might as well ...

And look what we found. I'm still tossing up where I'd most like to live.